The planning and scheduling steps to any project may impact the success, profitability and/or outcome of the project. An accurate project schedule aids in the decision making process and allocation of resources, quantifies goals and establishes a means of measuring success, and ensures that the project is carried out in a manner consistent with the values and priorities of the project stakeholders, that is any person having interest in the project, for example, project managers, superintendents, key subcontractors, etc.
In the construction industry, a project for constructing a building or a highway may last for several years and contain hundreds of activities and milestones that must be planned and scheduled to effectively complete the project. During the planning and scheduling processes, the activities and milestones must often be shifted, crashed, extended, or deleted to create a workable schedule. Any miscalculation could result in project delays, monetary losses and/or lawsuits. Moreover, after the project commences, there are typical delays due to weather, limited resources, etc., which may affect the start and/or finish times of future activities, and could result in an overall delay of the project if not properly accounted for in the schedule. Accordingly, the schedule may require updating during the life of the project so that adjustments can be made to address delays.
The Critical Path Method (“CPM”) has been the dominant scheduling paradigm in project management for many years. CPM is a scheduling system that is based on complex mathematical algorithms. CPM receives as inputs a list of activities required to complete a project, the duration of each activity and a dependency relationship between the activities. CPM stores the information in databases and utilizes inline scheduling engines to carry out schedule calculations in a succession of batch modes. To modify the schedule, the scheduler must input the modification into CPM and “wait and see” the effects on the regenerated schedule. This approach is inefficient for schedulers and project stakeholders to modify, rearrange or optimize a schedule after it has been created.
Accordingly, project stakeholders are encouraged to plan the schedule beforehand and pass the information to a trained scheduler who inputs the activities into CPM. However, this disconnected approach to planning and scheduling often results in schedules that are unworkable or that defy logic. Only through laborious planning or trial and error through CPM applications are realistic project schedules achieved.